In your own words what has been the progression since previous album Desolation came out?
It’s actually kind of interesting because before Desolation we have always struggled with this idea of being labelled as a doom band. We think that can be a constricting framework, if you go in expecting us to sound like Candlemass or something like that you’re probably going to feel a bit let down. We’ve always aimed to be a metal band that are doing all sorts of different things, like High On Fire or something where it doesn’t really matter what classification it fits under. Desolation was us trying to deliver on that by making an album that felt like us paying homage to the traditional heavy metal that got us into this kind of music in the first place. Something that could have been contemporary of Judas Priest on Sad Wings of Destiny or Sin After Sin.
With this album and the whole process of making it, it forced us to re-evaluate our relationship to the band and we decided to let go of the reins of feeling like we had to prove we were anything to anybody. This is the sound of us pulling from all the influences we have to create what we think is a really cohesive and dynamic album. It is a doomy album, we’re not going to try and run from that this time, there’s enough confidence in us now to know when we deliver an album it will sound like us no matter what. You’re getting a lot more explicit death and black metal influences and we’re dialling up the doom factor on this one. It’s inherently emotional and its born from a dark chapter in our lives.
From the beginning of your career you’ve tended towards longer songs, is that something you intend or do the songs take on a life of their own during the creative process?
I mean, I wish we could write sub-four minute songs sometimes! It always just feels like the song is over when it’s supposed to be over and we know where that is supposed to be. For it to really take you to the places we want to take you they generally have to be pretty long and it feels incomplete otherwise. We kind of succeeded with ‘Living Pyre’ which is around five minutes and still feels like a satisfying experience, and with ‘Isolation’ from Desolation. It’s difficult to do especially if it’s a downtempo song, if the riff is like forty seconds long and we base the song around it, it has to repeat enough times for the song to make sense, for it to have a vocal melody over it. Stuff has to be as long as it has to be. We want to be introducing a new element every time you hear something, it has to keep evolving, that’s something we’ve been working on with our song-writing, getting the right balance between things progressing in a way that makes sense the first time you hear them but are still rewarding on repeat listens with stuff you don’t notice right away. I think we’ve done better with that on this album than in the past. I’m proud of how we’ve improved as songwriters on this record to be able to support the songs better, trying to be economical with the time even though it normally ends up being a six and a half, seven minute song. We’re never going to sell a million records with eight minute long songs but for the people that want to listen to it, it provides that journey that we want to take you on. With the last track, ‘The Astral Road’, it starts with a clean guitar passage but that comes back as the final riff at the end of the song. They’re similar enough but it’s not too obvious that’s the thing that’s happening, we don’t want it to be obvious you’re hearing the same thing unless it’s the hook.
In many of your songs there’s a symmetry between the lyrics and the instrumentation in terms of the emotion and mood that they evoke, when you’re putting a song together do you start with the lyrics or does the music come first?
More the latter, we start with usually a riff and then we’ll start building a song. Maybe the riff needs to be harmonised or maybe juxtaposed against a death metal riff. We have to feel like the whole song is satisfying as an instrumental and the storytelling of the music has to be there. From there really the last thing that ever happens is that I’ll come up with a lyrical concept for the song based on listening to the music over and over again. While I’m doing that I’ll ad-lib vocal melody ideas. The hard part for me is that I’m never able to write lyrics until I have a melody, I try really hard to have the lyrics match syllable for syllable what the vocal melody is, I’d never be able to write a song where I start with the lyrics then come up with the melody. There’s some bands that do this and it becomes too wordy, I always want the words to be sympathetic to the melody rather than force everything to go along with it. So I’ll come up with a concept, like ‘this will be about my inability to reconcile with a memory I have regrets over’, I’ll start writing lyrics based on a vocal melody I come up with and usually this will change quite a bit in the studio. Me and our producer, Dave, have a really good relationship where we have a lot of faith in each other to experiment with these things so I’ll change a lot of lyrics at the last second. It’s always kinda stressful for me because I’m under the gun! But I always try to tap in to the energy of the song and what the song makes me feel, then what kind of story I want to tell.
“I always try to tap in to the energy of the song”
Your songs always have this mournful yet majestic atmosphere, the lyrics and song titles have almost apocalyptic connotations, are there any particular themes that come across strongly on Deceiver?
I hope this is true of all our albums, but it’s a reflection of who we were and what we were experiencing. Personally I was really struggling with a few different things, one being probably the greatest and deepest period of depression I’ve ever had. At the same time hundreds of thousands of people are dying and these huge social justice issues are coming to the forefront particularly in the US – Race, bodily autonomy, LGBTQ rights. All of these things that I have a lot of empathy for but they’re not my stories to tell. I’ve always drawn from a really personal place to write these songs and in this moment I felt like I didn’t have anything that was worth sharing whatsoever, because these things were so much bigger than the suffering I was experiencing with my mental health. I just found that it wasn’t really until I could just be honest that I was feeling disconnected from my art and my ability to do anything that I was sort of able to realise, maybe this is something I can dig into and have this be what I’m going to talk about. The first lyrics I wrote are ‘There is nothing left to give, nothing I can drag through coals to keep the flame alive inside’. That’s literally something I journaled one day about my life, about how I felt about making art, I had all this anger that I should be able to create something right now and that I just felt completely incapable. I’ve already exposed a lot of myself making songs and I don’t know if I have anything left to say. I had a concept for the album that I completely rejected because it didn’t feel honest any more and decided the concept for the record would revolve around this idea that the stories we tell ourselves define who we are. ‘I’m too broken to be useful in the world anymore’ or ‘my shame makes me a bad person’, these kinds of issues that we all end up struggling with to some degree are an inner deceiver that works in our minds. Each song would be me tackling a different one of these stories I believe about myself and trying to reconcile with them and I’m going to do it in a pretty unpoetic way sometimes so that it’s pretty obvious and that you don’t have to know me to understand what I’m talking about. There’s so much divisiveness in our world today and I feel like a lot of that comes from people pretending everything is fine, I think that this album is trying to encourage people to look at what makes them unhappy about themselves and break down those walls, and if we’re a little more honest about that maybe we can relate to each other again . So this record is about this collective and personal deception that we create in our lives that keeps us divorced from our feelings and who we are as people. It’s kind of a complicated concept to explain in a nice way but its a way of wrestling with a lot of deep seated issues and the record has given me a sense of relief at going through those things and documenting them. On the last song it doesn’t resolve to the note that a true musical resolution would happen on, and that sort of thematic element of that musical moment is really indicative of the nature of dealing with mental illness, reckoning with these issues, its never over and its okay that that’s how it is.
Are there any musical elements that craft the distinctive Khemmis sound?
There are a couple of things that are always there, we try and use the dual guitar dynamic kind of like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Mercyful Fate, Metallica do. They’re always doing something sort of counterpoint to each other. Typically a lot of the melodies are based out of natural and harmonic minor type of scales and we do a lot of harmonising in thirds. On this album in particular we tried to do a couple of new things that we haven’t done in the past to try and make it feel more distinct and cohesive. We used a lot of this, I don’t know technically what this should be called, double harmonic minor which uses a major seventh. It kind of has for lack of a better word a Middle Eastern sort of feel, which is also kinda Iron Maiden on some songs. Something we were trying to do consciously to try and escape the melodic structure of our past albums but that we also did because I was listening to a lot of Middle Eastern music and reading a lot of books when I was in quarantine. A lot of Tunisian music with the oud instrument and some other music from that area that was using not necessarily that scale but that was the feeling we wanted to evoke sometimes. A lot of the time when people are making Western music that uses non-Western scales it feels very contrived, like they’re ‘experimenting with Orientalism’ or some other awful musical tourism. We didn’t want to do that, we wanted to evoke it in a way that lent a mysterious vibe rather than something explicitly Middle Eastern. We didn’t do much that sounded exactly traditional metal until the last song, so we feel like that’s kind of a cool payoff for making it all the way. We’ve always had a mindset that the last song should be us trying to outdo the last record we made with a similar sound, so its like us writing a Desolation song but best every song on Desolation.
The artwork for all of your records is outstanding, apart from just looking cool how does the imagery evoked in the artwork relate to the concept of the album?
I think more than ever, the album is a cohesive unit between the music, the words and the artwork. We were really deliberate about all that. For the last few albums I’ve been really involved with the artist, Sam Turner, who does our album art. I’ll come up with a concept for it, I’ll draw sketches of what I’m picturing, make sure the guys are all into it then I’ll send it to Sam and we’ll work iteratively from that. We wanted this central figure to be the focus, pretty large so there’s a lot of detail on him and then for him to be wading through essentially the River Styx or any of the rivers of hell where they’re kind of a purgatory. He’s there searching for something rather than being dismayed that he’s in this place, maybe he’s there voluntarily. He’s confronting, literally, his reflection in the water which is a demonic version of him that’s pulling him under but he doesn’t look resigned to this fate. To get it all right I wrote this entire short story to Sam, the backstory and how it relates to past album covers, the emotion we’re trying to convey, what the colour palette should be. He just nailed it, it emphasises what the album is about thematically because here is this person who’s being deceived by and confronting the shadow that lives inside of them, and it’s threatening to take his life but he’s kind of willing to stare it in the face and fight with it, he’s not just a victim. That’s what the album is trying to do, reckon with these shadow aspects of ourselves and be unafraid to see what you can learn from them. I’m excited for people to get the vinyl.
I bet it looks awesome full size!
The digital version kind of does a disservice to how great it is, on the backside of the vinyl there’s another painting and on the inside we have a booklet with art for each song. I’m really proud of the whole package, it looks amazing and Nuclear Blast did a really good job in making sure it met all of our expectations.
Mythology and fantasy have always been a hallmark of metal lyrics, it seems as if many of the song titles and lyrics on this album have mythological connotations, is that something that plays a part?
It creates so much more of a full experience when you can create a whole world that this idea lives in, all the album covers are cohesive in aesthetic and there’s a storyline you can infer from them that perhaps isn’t obvious. I’ll try not to ruin that for people as I love when people have their own interpretation. The mythology goes deep on this record, some of the song titles are allusions to Greek mythology and some of the lyrics contend with some of the lyrics of some of those myths, that I see as related to the stories I was telling. There’s an element of the tragic hero in mythology who is relatable, it’s not just escapism its about this real human experience and their downfall comes from the things that make them human. That’s something I try to emphasise with our music, even when it’s epic and it’s about overcoming something, I don’t want it to go full power metal. There’s something better about it when these stories are human and imperfect. I kind of tried to emulate Dante’s Inferno in terms of the lyrical structure, you sort of start with the deepest fears that I have and slowly work your way up through the different circles of hell and at the end you maybe reach the point where you can see the daylight again. It feels very related to mythology and it’s very satisfying because these are all archetypes that we know and understand.
“There’s an element of the tragic hero in mythology who is relatable”
Deceiver was released on the 19th November via Nuclear Blast Records, you can purchase it here.